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Ellen Blumner
ENGL394 Expecting a B Anonymous 05/15/2014 |
If you are reading this right now, then you are likely enrolled in her class. RUN. DROP. CLOSE THE PAGE. I am a 3.6 junior finance major at the University of Maryland. I have held two internships (one at Morgan Stanley) and currently going to work in NYC over the summer. Obviously, I have the ability to write professionally. I received a C+ in this class. The first C grade that I have ever received IN MY LIFE. Here is a breakdown of how shitty a professor she is: 1) She can't communicate. Her voice sounds like death, and she fails to return emails that she doesn't know the direct answer to. She cannot keep anyone's attention in class, and she fails to elaborate on grading. She'll give you a B on an A paper simply because you used one too many spaces in between paragraphs. She once told me that one of my papers was incomplete. And that was it. She didn't say why or how. She just said I was wrong and it was over. 2) WAY TOO MUCH WORK. She requires you to write a paper every week, and post in at least two or three discussions a week. You learn nothing from these discussions, and they're simply just time consuming. If we had this work and it actually MEANT something, I wouldn't be opposed. But it was useless. 3) Not organized. On the first day of class, she asked the students if they could find her a TA. THE STUDENTS. Are you kidding me? She also was not prepared for the several snow days, and struggled to tell us when assignments were changed. 4) Extremely bias. If you don't go to class everyday and participate, she'll hate you. I was actually not one of these people. She actually liked me, and believed I could succeed in this class. Until she paired me up with someone in the class that she hates. She gave us a crappy grade on our final project because SHE DIDN'T LIKE HIM. How do I know this? I compared projects. She gave us a 50% on format when the format was copied and pasted from an example project that she gave us. Overall, the worst teacher I've ever had in my life. I've seen challenged kids get A's in this class solely because their teacher wasn't insane. This teacher is a disgrace to this University, and I'm disappointed that she represents our school. If you think that you'll get through this class with an A because you're better than everyone else at writing, think again. That was my process. And look what it did. |
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Ellen Blumner
ENGL394 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 12/11/2013 |
If it were possible to give this woman a negative rating I would. When you take this class and it says "staff" when you sign up and you realize on the first day that you have E. Blumner DROP IT IMMEDIATELY. TAKE IT AGAIN WITH SOMEONE ELSE (ANYONE ELSE). I am currently a junior at UMD and in all of the years of my schooling I have never encountered a more miserable teacher. Here is the breakdown of why: Blumner plays favorites and it is beyond apparent who her favorites. If you aren't one of her favorites, she absolutely despises you and makes sure that you are aware of it. I unfortunately upset her very early on in the year and have never (will never) recover from it. What upset her? The fact that after I finished my in class assignment, I worked on assignments for other classes. When she approached me about doing other work, I calmly asked her if she had any other work for me to do during the allotted class time. Her reply was a very snarky "no" and she marched away. From this point forward she went out of her way to make snide comments to me and about me to not only the TA but also other students in the class including "well you aren't the worst writer in the class." Additionally the amount of work that Blumner makes you complete for this class is insane. And once she marks you as one of her hated students, no matter how flawless the work you turn in, you will never receive the score you deserve. You will at best get a slightly better than average score. Her arbitrary point system of -.65 of a point for punctuation on your assignments diminishes your grade from an A to a B. The work she gives you is completely busy work and generally useless in terms of learning. She offers no actual insight into your writing but nitpicks specifics of your grammar or punctuation. Also beware of her "professionalism" grade. She has an arbitrary point system for professionalism that includes (Direct quote) " on-time, regular attendance; notification of absence in one or two cases all semester when class HAD to be missed; no other work but ours during classtime, including discussion board posts; phone usage; well done peer reviews; revision of projects and sending of surveys to clients." And when she determines that she doesn't like you, she gives you a 3/5 for professionalism because "you have a negative attitude" and should not be rewarded for that. A student in my class actually sent her an email calling her "a completely incompetent person" and still received a 4.5/5 on professionalism because he was on her "hated students list." Also: She does not follow the syllabus, she adds in extra assignments, and she makes you do discussion posts. These discussion posts (generally 3-4 per week) are the most USELESS waste of your time possible and they are completed for a grade. You even have to respond to 1-2 of your peers discussion posts which is even more irritating and pointless. Less than 1/2 of my class currently completes these worthless discussions. And finally. Just to give you an idea of how awful she truly is: The first day of classes we began with 23 students. 5 people dropped immediately. Since that point 6 students have WITHDRAWN from the course, one student with less than four weeks until the end of the semester. The fact that this woman drove away nearly half of her class is a very telling of her teaching ability. SUMMARY: -Miserable teacher who doesn't teach you anything. -Holds grudges against students. -Plays favorites and absolutely torments those who are not her favorites. -Arbitrary grading system -Grades work of students who are not her favorites EXTREMELY hard -Assigns BUSY WORK ALL THE TIME -Incredibly large work load. Bonus: -Horrible speaking voice (nails on a chalkboard is a sweet symphony compared to her voice). |
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Ellen Blumner
ENGL394 Expecting a B Anonymous 05/17/2012 |
I have been attending school for thirteen years now, and I can say, without a doubt in my mind, that Professor Ellen Blumner is the worst teacher I have ever encountered. Yes, I know this is a big statement, but I wholeheartedly believe it is deserved. She made attending this class and doing the subsequent work absolutely miserable. As a professor, one of your goals is to instill knowledge and actually teach your students. Professor Blumner did not even come close to accomplishing either of these objectives. She would not “teach” anything, as all of the material that was learned came from other students making chapter presentations to the rest of the class. When presented with most questions, her response would be “go look at the textbook.” Oftentimes, the textbook disagreed with what she wanted anyways, thus reducing your grade. In addition, much of the work we complete is tedious busy work. That is ironic because she stated at the first class that she prided herself on not assigning any busywork. However her way around this minor detail was to assign most every assignment we handed in, a value. This led to a few worth 1% or 2% of the final grade, or them being looped into her wide-arching “professionalism” grade. A prime example of this is the in AIDA class writing assignment that took many students an hour or so after class to complete. This was graded on a credit/no credit basis, worth 1% of the final grade. On top of this, she offered zero feedback on the grades, and the only thing students saw was the grade on ELMS. Unfortunately, many of those assignments took hours to complete. The sad thing is that this class had the potential to be very useful, if taught correctly (or at least, any bit better than Professor Blumner displayed). I know that I will have to write many business propositions and memos and other professional documents as I enter and thrive in the corporate world. Sadly, this course did not help prepare me to do this. She would flip-flop on her own ideas of how to do something; sometimes she would tell us to consult the textbook, while other times instructing us the book was wrong. Mind you, this would be for the same assignment/part of an assignment. That covers much of the academic area of Professor Blumner. Lets move on to an area that she could possibly be worse in: her behavior. Playing favorites is something that should be avoided as much as possible, especially in a school or University setting. It is not fair to the students are “favorites”, and much less fair to the ones that draw the ire of their instructors. Evidently Professor Blumner was never made aware of this. From day 1 of the class, it was apparent who she liked and who she did not. I was fortunate to be one of the ones who did not irk her. However, some of my classmates were not as lucky. For the entire semester, she would offer snide comments and pick on them. While I have no proof, myself and other students strongly believe that she graded the students she did not like much harder than the ones that she did. That is simply not fair, as students should be graded on the quality of their work, not whether they are loved or loathed by the professor. On top of that, she used very elementary methods of getting our attention. If she had the smallest thing to say, Professor Blumner would incessantly clap her hands until we all were paying attention. While this was an effective method because all of the students just wanted the obnoxious noise to come to a halt, there has to be a better method of doing so. And we were by no means an obnoxious or unruly class. Her voice, while certainly out of her control, did nothing to contribute to the learning of the class. It was almost impossible to understand her, thanks to the scratchiness and low volume of her voice. In addition, she would often cut herself off mid sentence and say, “you know what I mean. ” Unfortunately, we rarely knew what she meant, and she was not making any effort to clarify things. I know you shouldn’t be prevented from doing something by something natural, like your voice, but there has to be some type of way around this. It really pained me to listen to her speak. I contemplated dropping this class very early in the semester, but we were assigned a partner and assigned a semester long consulting project. I did not want to disappoint my partner, and make him take on the gargantuan task by himself, so I decided to stick it out. In hindsight, that was one of the worst decisions I have made, academics-wise in all of my life. I should have convinced him to drop with me and take it next semester taught by a professor that was capable and not miserable. As you can probably tell by now, I had a horrible experience with this class, and more importantly, the professor. One of the very few positives that I can draw from this is that I am happy her name is not associated with the business school. I feel like she is a serious detriment to the university as a whole. The fact that I am paying tens of thousands of dollars to attend this fine institution, and this is the quality of instruction I receive; well I find that to be completely unacceptable. |
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Ellen Blumner
ENGL394 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/12/2012 |
Blumner may go down as one of the worst teachers the university has ever had. If Blumner does not like you on the first day of class your grade will be affected tremendously. She plays favorites, and holds grudges for the entire semester. Additionally, it is not that she simply holds grudges, she will attempt to make your life miserable and call you out in every class and grade you harder than other students in the class. She has no problem sounding like a bitter/grumpy old lady. In terms of the actual class, everything is completely useless and tedious. She believes that assignments are not busy work if she attaches a grade to them, so she will simply make assignments worth 1% of your overall grade that will take you hours to complete. On top of that she does not follow her syllabus at all, and will change her guidelines and expectations on a person to person basis and will never clearly state what she wants. Your grade will essentially come down to how much she likes you (and you will realize she likes NO ONE!) Additionally, Blumner never really taught any classes. For class, she would have groups of students present chapters from the textbook. Beyond that, she would instruct us to do meaningless book exercises, and then offer little feedback on the correctness of our answers. If you asked her a technical question, her response, more often than not was “consult the textbook.” Beyond that, she had one of her TA’s present a chapter lesson. I can hardly recall learning something of value from her. Lastly, another point that I would like to touch on is the voice of the professor. Now, i know this is nothing that she can control, but when teaching a class to numerous students throughout the day it really is important that the professor can speak. Her voice might possibly be one of the most irritating sounds you will ever hear. And i know many students can attest to this fact that it was indeed painful to listen to and became quite the distraction. In conclusion, Do NOT TAKE HER CLASS or consider yourself warned!! |
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Ellen Blumner
ENGL394 Expecting a B Anonymous 12/15/2011 |
Blumner is easily the worst teacher I have ever come across at this school. I signed up for the class when it still said "Staff," and what a mistake that was. First day of class I came to realize that this professor had clearly just suffered a stroke because her speech was horrible. Funny how the women who can't string a sentence together without stuttering is teaching English. I should have dropped the class the first day. The project you complete for this class if beyond ridiculous. You find a real world client and then complete 10 pages of single spaced writing per group member on the client's problem. The syllabus in this class is meaningless. She changes every assignment and due date. I got an A in ENGL101 and mistakenly took this class for business school purposes. I barely scraped by with a B from this professor. She refused to acknowledge her mistakes and ended up giving me a 50% on an assignment that she deleted from my ELMS folder because after I uploaded it again it was past the due date. The professor would consistently rip on her other sections. I had a friend in the class before mine, and he would always tell how she hated my class. At one point she even told our entire class that we were all lazy. She told a few people they should drop the class and receive the 'W.' Don't take this class with this professor. She is a miserable human being. This class and this professor is the reason I got drunk Mondays and Wednesdays. |
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Ellen Blumner
ENGL394 Expecting a B klash 11/04/2009 |
I would not recommend this professor at all. She is very grumpy and takes every assignment very personally. She holds grudges about everything, especially if you miss a class (although I never did, I saw her do it to many other students). If you say something to her that she doesn't like, she gets very angry and can be outright mean. She called out or yelled at several students right in the middle of class in front of everyone. If she decides she does not like you (which I think was more than half of the class by the time the class was over) she will never be nice to you again. She grades very unfairly. I actually heard her say to a student: "I can't believe what your GPA is here at the University, I am going to make sure that is changed by the end of this course." The other major problem was that she gave us a class syllabus, than basically did the exact opposite of anything the syllabus said. Every assignment was changed or completely unclear. She would say one way to do it in class, than post another way to do it online, than say to refer to the book, which was never the way she actually wanted us to do it. Than, when we got to class she would be in another one of her moods and would decide to throw in another part that essentially no one did, than proceed to mark down everyone else for not doing it, using the justification that one or two students did it as proof that we all should have known it was necessary. Also, syllabus due dates were ALWAYS changed. I don't think a single one was the same as the syllabus said. This makes it extremely hard to plan out when to do the work ahead of time (as I have to do with an extremely busy schedule). I could go on even more about the problems with this professor, but to sum it up she is a grumpy old lady and a terrible teacher. Plus, the class material in ENGL394 was tedious and pointless. It was nothing anyone will ever use in the real world. STAY AWAY! |
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Ellen Blumner
ENGL394 Expecting a B superstar 05/28/2009 |
sincere advice to fellow students: Stay away from her!!! -Strict grader/not fair grader (will not hasitate to give you "zero" on any assignment) -Not Friendly AT ALL (sometimes worse) -assignment instructions NOT CLEAR -WISPERS the ENTIRE LECTURE!!!!!!!!!!! it is very difficult to hear her. That's All... wish you good luck if you take her cuz you gonna need dat :P |